Game Development
In college I majored in Computer Network Engineering, however, to be a more rounded student they encouraged us to take additional programming classes. I took a course on Vector Graphics and the final exam of that course was to build and deploy a single player video game using Flash. I created a side scrolling game based off the 1984 movie titled "Red Dawn". I ended up getting perfect marks on that project, unfortunately with the sunset of Flash and the amount of time that has passed since then, I no longer have that game to show.
During my time with Project Return Home, I provided assistance in many PCAP (Packet Capture) Analysis using WireShark and TShark. I was looking for anything that would help us further the cause such as server communication to figure out any how often the game was saving and loading data, how much data was being sent at a time and how often since it was a PS2 Game the data transfer rate was a bit different than PC due to the ethernet adapter for the PS2 and security analysis to see if there would be anything blocking us from gathering further or more in-depth information.
I also used to enjoy modding games. The main games I would mod were Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The Fallout series had a few private forums that contained a modding community and I have submitted upwards of 30 modifications for that game, unfortunately, many of those forums were shut down and the Skyrim Mods
on Steam are the only remaining modifications I have left to show.
In game building, arguably the biggest thing that gets players hooked is story. Giving players fiero moments by overcoming odds is great, but when they have an emotional connection to their purpose of the accomplishment it increases their rush tenfold. This is something I have strived to do in my many home-brew campaigns of Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40k: Wrath and Glory, Pathfinder, Exodus and many other tabletop games. I have years of experience in world building and rarely had a complaint. As I got older I have moved to DMing on Roll20, albeit infrequently, where I have nearly 20 hours of DM experience online. In the same vein as Dungeons and Dragons I also developed a dice rolling application that uses JavaScript to roll common Dungeons and Dragons dice.
During my time with Project Return Home, I provided assistance in many PCAP (Packet Capture) Analysis using WireShark and TShark. I was looking for anything that would help us further the cause such as server communication to figure out any how often the game was saving and loading data, how much data was being sent at a time and how often since it was a PS2 Game the data transfer rate was a bit different than PC due to the ethernet adapter for the PS2 and security analysis to see if there would be anything blocking us from gathering further or more in-depth information.
I also used to enjoy modding games. The main games I would mod were Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The Fallout series had a few private forums that contained a modding community and I have submitted upwards of 30 modifications for that game, unfortunately, many of those forums were shut down and the Skyrim Mods
on Steam are the only remaining modifications I have left to show.
In game building, arguably the biggest thing that gets players hooked is story. Giving players fiero moments by overcoming odds is great, but when they have an emotional connection to their purpose of the accomplishment it increases their rush tenfold. This is something I have strived to do in my many home-brew campaigns of Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40k: Wrath and Glory, Pathfinder, Exodus and many other tabletop games. I have years of experience in world building and rarely had a complaint. As I got older I have moved to DMing on Roll20, albeit infrequently, where I have nearly 20 hours of DM experience online. In the same vein as Dungeons and Dragons I also developed a dice rolling application that uses JavaScript to roll common Dungeons and Dragons dice.
Server Administration
I helped create and format an Item Database using MySQL for Project Return Home. I also handled the user permissions for the back-end of the website and assigned FTP credentials to user in order to make changes to the site to keep the download section updated or send news-letters and upload custom assets.
On an unreleased project, currently still under NDA, I helped create AWS EC2 solutions. Due to the nature of the NDA, I am not at liberty to provide further information.
When New World came out many players in the forums had questions related to servers, including why there were no listed CST servers, what was the latency going to look like, etc. I created a reddit post that turned into a video all about basic server infrastructure, cloud networking, AWS infrastructure and whatnot. It was a very well received article and video according to the comments and likes and helped quell many issues players had with the direction the game developers and network engineers took.
On an unreleased project, currently still under NDA, I helped create AWS EC2 solutions. Due to the nature of the NDA, I am not at liberty to provide further information.
When New World came out many players in the forums had questions related to servers, including why there were no listed CST servers, what was the latency going to look like, etc. I created a reddit post that turned into a video all about basic server infrastructure, cloud networking, AWS infrastructure and whatnot. It was a very well received article and video according to the comments and likes and helped quell many issues players had with the direction the game developers and network engineers took.
Content Creation
During my tenure with Project: Return Home, I wrote a script that interacted with the API for waybackmachine to pull relevant data for SOE's EverQuest Online Adventures, after its sunset in 2012. With that information I created a website for Project: Return Home which has gained enough SEO to be the first search result for EQOA which has helped drive more traffic to Discord and increased volunteers to work on the PC port.
As I learn more about a game I like to share my knowledge with other players. This comes in the form of Steam Community guides. I have written two community guides that are some of the highest 5-star rated for their respective games of Elder Scrolls Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online based on almost 800 reviews.
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is an ambitious project undertaken by Visionary Realms which was lead by the industry giant Brad McQuaid from the Everquest Series. I noticed that the official game Wiki was in disrepair, I took it upon myself to create art assets from their already released art assets, scoured their HTML for any commented out code that would give me more information, reviewed the main websites color scheme, etc, then I rebuilt the Wiki and provided future players with Wiki templates to use to build quest, class and race information. That work was not unnoticed from the community as I was invited on a Podcast for my efforts and to discuss the game and the work I did.
For prior to the launch of Amazon Games MMORPG, New World, I took the list of lore pages they released in advance of the game launching and I created spoken word versions in video format for those gamers who may have of had trouble reading
As I learn more about a game I like to share my knowledge with other players. This comes in the form of Steam Community guides. I have written two community guides that are some of the highest 5-star rated for their respective games of Elder Scrolls Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online based on almost 800 reviews.
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is an ambitious project undertaken by Visionary Realms which was lead by the industry giant Brad McQuaid from the Everquest Series. I noticed that the official game Wiki was in disrepair, I took it upon myself to create art assets from their already released art assets, scoured their HTML for any commented out code that would give me more information, reviewed the main websites color scheme, etc, then I rebuilt the Wiki and provided future players with Wiki templates to use to build quest, class and race information. That work was not unnoticed from the community as I was invited on a Podcast for my efforts and to discuss the game and the work I did.
For prior to the launch of Amazon Games MMORPG, New World, I took the list of lore pages they released in advance of the game launching and I created spoken word versions in video format for those gamers who may have of had trouble reading
QA Testing
As I have been gaming for about 30 years from my first experience with an NES, I have had ample opportunities to QA test games in Alpha and Beta states. A few of the games I helped bug test, stress test and report UI/UX feedback on were New World, World of Warcraft, EverQuest Online Adventures: Frontiers, Overwatch 2, Pirates!, Wild Terra 2, Pantheon: Rise of the fallen, Call of Duty III, Diablo IV, MultiVersus, Ashes of Creation, Fallout 76, Dawn of War III, EverQuest: Landmark, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and many others. I also have experience black box and white box testing in my role at Project Return Home, exploring the world as it is built for internal patch launches and performing code review and assisting with PCAP checks.
Social Media & Marketing
Using social media I was able to progress a mildly successful Twitch Channel where I played many games from FPS, RTS, MMORPG, etc. Using Facebook Advertisement campaigns I was able to research what age-range viewed what game and I could market to that age demographic for a week and for the following twelve days after play that game genre. This lead to a higher turn over for interaction in chat, followers and subscriptions. I used Twitter on an account made specifically for my Twitch handle and followed groups and people that I felt may repost content and I would aim to cater content that would have a link to some interesting going-on in the gaming world and then also attach a link to my Twitch channel.Instagram was a big help as well, posting screenshots of interesting chats, battles or victory pages would bring people into make comments and it did have a slower turn-over of clicks to views but every little bit helped starting out.
eCommerce
During my tenure at the eCommerce branch of CapitalOne I noticed a few issues with Method's website, the eSports team that has participated in World of Warcraft's world first race, PvP Championships and many other games. I reached out and as it turned out they were thinking of hiring additional eCommerce employees, I made a mock-up of a site that had extensive functionality on both front and back-end, corrected major issues with their eCommerce site and provided a better UI/UX experience. During that time I had many email correspondence with Sascha Steffens (Rak), Brayden Wilmoth, Niclas Lund and Scott McMillan (Sco). Unfortunately they were looking for someone who would be able to work in-office and not remote as well they wanted to stick with Shopify for the time being. I did receive a very thoughtful and heartfelt email from their eCommerce Director, Niclas Lund, commending me on the hard-work I put into the site and the passion I possessed.